


The Closing Distance

by fluffernutter8



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s02e13 Surprise, Episode: s03e12 Helpless, F/M, Season/Series 02, Season/Series 03, lots of self indulgent rambling sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 08:32:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8526103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: "You went away today."
AU from Surprise. Distance is not for the fearful.





	1. Chapter 1

The boat has barely slid away from the dock when one of the sailors asks, “That your girl?” from over Angel’s shoulder. The German-accented words are unaccompanied by anything actually rude, but the leeringly appreciative tone is enough. Angel turns, just as he sees Buffy straighten. A second later, a hard piece of asphalt hits the sailor on the shoulder.

“Was zur Hölle?” He spins in a stupid circle, trying to figure out how anyone could hit him, or even hear him. Angel sniffs, wipes at his eyes with his thumb, and laughs dryly.

“Yeah, that’s my girl.”

* * *

He spends the next few hours exploring the ship, getting a sense of things. Something bothers him with each step, and finally he realizes that it is the loneliness and guilt which were his most constant companions, the ones that withdrew deeper into his heart each time he earned one of Buffy's smiles. Now they spread themselves out like floodwater within his chest, giving him a lethargic smile as they remind him of how familiar this is. He did this for decades, and soon California and Buffy and worth will be blinked away, and he will return to the natural dark and filth.

He pushes the feelings away as much as he is able. They snicker as they go.

They'll be back soon.

Strange how this morning Buffy was at his door, and now he is sailing away from her. But Angel has had a few centuries to get used to how quickly things shift. He has no more lamentations for the eyeblinks that mean a change. Killing a young girl, seeing one on sunlit school steps; these things took seconds and changed everything.

Most of the crew is German, the rest a tight-knit group from Brazil who chat together in Portuguese. Sunnydale is the last stop before open ocean, so everyone is sighing in relief, glad for some time to sleep instead of forcing themselves awake to hit the next port on the coast. Within an hour, they’re down to a skeleton crew, and Angel is free to examine the interchangeable metal hallways.

He encounters no one until the kitchen. They keep it cleaner than he’s used to or expected, ingredients tucked away, the table wiped down, and one man standing over a sink full of dishes. Angel starts to back out, but the man turns, a heavy pan still covered in soap your hand. He grimaces, embarrassed, and Angel ducks backward.

“Sorry,” the sailor blurts, turning to drop the pan into the sink. It comes out, unexpectedly, in Russian. Angel can no longer see his face, but his shoulders squeeze inward, young and awkward, and then he repeats himself in English.

“Don’t worry,” Angel says. His voice is hoarse and he speaks slowly, but his Russian is perfect, as if the language is something he stored in an attic chest, one he just creaked open to find it pristine. “It was my fault. I startled you.”

“No, no. You must be the new passenger. Here, sit.”

Angel takes the offered chair gingerly, as if he is unaccustomed to sitting, or to politeness. The sailor overlooks that easily, likely because when you’ve spent time on an ancient, patched cargo ship such as this, you find that the people who choose to use it as transportation are rarely normal.

The sailor peers into one of the pots waiting for washing on the sideboard. Angel protests, but a moment later there is a bowl of stew and a few slices of bread in front of him.

“My grandmother would visit my dreams if I didn’t feed a guest,” says the sailor, going back to the sink. “And she would be very unkind.”

“It’s a difficult thing, being haunted by those you love.” It comes out grated, as if Angel is barely speaking to the other man. “Particularly when they have only unkind things to say.” He stands, walking over to the sink. That human instinct sets itself in, the subconscious knowledge of a vampire’s danger, and the sailor steps away, but Angel only slots himself beside him and picks up a dish and a sponge. Logic and politeness win out. The two of them wash together in silence until everything is shined clean and then they nod to each other and go to bed.

Angel hopes that the man did not notice that he rinsed his bowl without eating anything.

* * *

Three nights later he sees him again.

“No one seems to know what to call you,” says the sailor, transferring flour from a bag to a container. He doesn’t spill any, which is disappointing. Messy kitchens, messy ships, attract more vermin for eating. Pushing the thought of starvation rations away, Angel unbuttons his sleeves and rolls them up, filling the sink with water.

“I’m Angel.”

“Noether.” They have been speaking Russian, but he pronounces it with the up-and-down cadence and restrained syllables of German. Seeing Angel’s look, he grins. “My grandmother was a teacher of mathematics and physics. Emmy Noether was one of her heroes. Einstein called her ‘the most significant creative mathematical genius’ since women were allowed education in universities.” Noether has a thin, friendly face, but it is the speed of his words that makes Angel think that he does not have much chance for deep conversation, considering the language barrier.

That feels familiar.

“Your grandmother raised you?” Angel turns away as soon as the question is out, hoping that Noether will not see the startled look on his face. He is not a small-talker, and he doesn’t know where the words came from.

“Yes, me and my brothers and my sister. My brothers are Euler and Feynman, and my sister is called Sofia.” Angel looks over, hands still swiping a plate clean. “After Sofia Kovalevskaya, but she thought that would be cruelty for a child.”

“A name like that would have been part of a long national tradition, anyway,” Angel says dryly. He’s known Russians with enough syllables in their names to christen three people.

Noether laughs. “And what about you? Brothers or sisters?”

He has been asked the question before, by store clerks, and seatmates, and all manner of well-meaning, barely interested strangers. And he has for decades, without considering otherwise, lied or turned away or remained silent. But here in the belly of the ship, without considering otherwise, he says, “My sister’s name was Kathy. She was murdered. A long time ago.” The words tuck into themselves, collapsing beneath centuries of grief. He knows that he has a reputation for being mysterious- Buffy has admonished him for it more than once, although he is more open with her than he has been with anyone else- but the pain that comes from him is so clear-eyed that Noether turns away.

“I shouldn’t have asked that,” he mumbles after a moment, examining a chipped plate with impossible thoroughness. “I apologize.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” says Angel, the words padded with self-recrimination. But he’s grown spoiled in Sunnydale, relaxed into his old selfishness because he was doing a drop of good, and he does not want to spend untold months in oceanic silence. He adds, with a bit of desperation, “I have a girl I left back in Sunnydale, where you picked me up.”

Noether’s face moves cautiously back into a smile. They haven’t spoken long enough for it to be comfortable, but it might be a start, Angel thinks. “A girl is good. Let us get you back to her soon.”

* * *

“Tell me about your girl.”

It is weeks later, another kitchen midnight. Everything is folded away except the mugs of tea in front of them. They are somewhere off of South America. Later tonight, Angel will go out and look at the stars and imagine the miles between here and what he thinks of now as home.

“Her name is Buffy,” Angel starts, and then pauses. Noether was not above deck when he came aboard, had not seen Buffy walk with him and fight with him, accept Angel’s ring and match his tears with hers, and send him on his way with only a strange box and a heart turned inward. Angel does not know the words for her.

“She makes me smile,” he tries, and it is more inadequate than he ever could have thought, and still simple, buoyant truth. Noether lifts his mug and takes a sip. He looks as if he is being told a bedtime story.

"She knows just how to be cruel," Angel says. He thinks of Buffy after the summer, still haunted by the Master, the digging ease of her words. "And it just reminds me of how kind she is, how easily she could turn that against people but how she puts it away instead and uses herself to help people, even strangers." He lowers his head. His voice hushes against the table. “She’s open with her heart. Sometimes more than she should be.”

It is something he’s come to think about more and more, away from her. How it could hurt her, being with him. Put her in danger, yes, but also ruin her youth. Because although she has more responsibility than anyone he’s ever known, the weight of lives and lives, she also has her own, and it is such a young one. He wants to be sure that she doesn’t look with regret on these months spent with him, the cliffside love with someone whose life is endlessly futureless.

He has thought these things before, but now there are no more touches or smiles or words or moments of helping people to turn him into an optimist, to make him forget that every part of him is bloodied and he let Buffy touch that.

Noether’s face looks all made of angles, intersections of night and weariness. “Whatever thoughts you’re having, stop,” he says, brushing a hand through the air. “Choose something that doesn’t make you look as if you’re six feet beneath the ground.”

Angel lowers his head, takes a minute to build himself into a place where he can flick a smile onto his face and pretend that he is able to make his thoughts disappear.

* * *

Giles had suggested a place for the arm, a remote island about two thousand miles off the coast of South Africa. (“I’m afraid Nepal has become a bit overdone in the last few decades as a supernatural hiding place,” he had said with one of his private Giles smiles.) In addition to the protection of water and distant inconvenience, it had some sort of history of mystical worship that left it well-protected.

“That will make it difficult for you to approach,” Giles had warned. It’s something Angel is familiar with, and he has been preparing himself for it, for a burning or a repelling force.

He doesn’t expect to be overcome while they’re still a week away from even reaching the first stopping point on his journey at Valencia. One morning he goes to sleep, and cannot get out of his bed for five days.

Each minute lasts endlessly, filled with the minute memories of all the things he has done. He is trapped in remembrance of Liam’s petty violences, and dreams Angelus’s dreams, of screams and selfish, inevitable hunger and a grin filled with blood. His mind reminds him over and over of the rats he has eaten in alleys and occasionally below these decks and how they are nothing compared to a wriggling, warm human. And when he does not dream, the pain blots out everything, sinking and rising so that he feels as if it must collide and dissolve at some place inside him, but instead it manages a physicist’s trick and stretches everywhere.

When he finally opens painless eyes, he feels cleaner than he has in a long time, somehow open and filled at once, the way a deep sigh of early morning air once felt in his lungs. He thinks it is twilight, the time of Baudelaire’s blue-wet horizons. Noether sits by his bed, eyes forward. Between clasped hands, he holds a stake.

Ships have transformed like so much else. Angel doesn’t know where he found the wood in all this metal.

“My grandmother was not my grandmother.” They have talked night by night over weeks and Angel has never heard Noether’s voice like this. “She found me, found my brothers and my sister with no one to care for us, and took us in.” He looks at Angel with a midnight gaze. “You know where I grew up.”

“Near Norilsk.” They’ve talked about it before, about the town near the freezing top of the world and a childhood of snowy, smoky air that made him want to leave as soon as he was grown.

“We have times of short days, months of no sun. It makes a perfect home for vampires. Everyone knows not to leave home after dark without a stake or to let anyone in who cannot cross your doorstep on their own. But sometimes the precautions don’t matter. They didn’t help my parents or the parents of my siblings. So when the woman I called Grandmother found us and took us in, she taught us to be more careful.”

Angel wants to stretch, to sit up. It makes no sense; his muscles haven’t needed it for so long, he should have surely overcome the instinct by now. He ignores the feeling, and very carefully does not move. He recognizes Noether’s hurricane-eyed fury.

“You don’t move like other vampires,” says Angel’s friend. Angel understands that, too. Most vampires walk with an arrogance that is noticeable if you are looking.

“How did you figure it out?” Angel’s voice stays quiet, defeated rather than accusatory.

“Well, you didn’t need to eat or use the bathroom for nearly a week.” Some of the humor comes back into his words before he represses it. “And then you tried to say the Hail Mary in your sleep, so I brought a cross for you.” He gestures, and Angel looks down and notices for the first time the burn edging across his palm.

“Why didn’t you just kill me before?”

“I’ve met vampires. I’ve killed vampires. I’ve done it on this ship. Do you think you’re the only one who has tried to cross the world on my boat? But none of them have helped me clean my kitchen and touched no one on board and spoken about a woman they love.”

Angel feels his face give a reserved twitch of guilt. “That was a dangerous choice,” he says.

“You seemed to lack danger, crying there in your bed.” This time, as much as Noether tries to prop up his rage, the words still soften, sounding almost friendly, like worry and teasing all in one. The phrase _A century, alone_ , echoes around Angel’s head. “What happened to you?”

“I’m not sure.” That seems troubling for the first time since he woke up, but there’s little to do about it. He blurts, “I have a soul,” which immediately seems like a foolish, patchwork excuse, especially for someone who knows only the vicious basics of vampires. After a gathering pause, a second to listen to the ship moving through the water, he adds, “I’m still mostly a vampire, though. I shouldn’t be able to get sick unless something supernatural is going on.”

“Your Buffy. Does she know what you are?”

“Yes.” It almost brings a laugh from him. “She tried to kill me almost right away. Gave me less benefit of the doubt than you did, at first.” The memory is tinged with fondness; he has to work to push it away.

Noether is staring at him. His knuckles have relaxed around the stake. “I’m guessing it’s a long story?” he asks.

“One that isn’t over.” Angel stretches finally, allowing his arms to push his frame up against the curving metal of the wall. He glances around the dim room, then speaks to the gathered blankets in his lap. “I’m supposed to go home to her. I promised that. I want that.”

 _A century, alone_ , echoes Angel’s mind, as Noether pushes a leg forward and says, “In my experience, you would not mention that unless you were going to break the promise.”

“She is very young,” he starts. “She has a lot of responsibility and a dangerous job that doesn’t have great life expectancy statistics, but she’s still young.”

“And there’s always the matter of law,” Noether says, head tipped sharply. Angel winces. Although he’d known girls who married at that age when he had been young, despite the way the image of his time has somehow been transformed in the centuries since, married women had mostly been in their twenties. If that was true then, he could likely get arrested today if anyone in Sunnydale was paying attention.

“But even if she were older, the problem is me. The things I did before my soul live in my head, but I would never want to let them out so anyone I loved would know about them. But if it’s all theory to her, then how can she truly know the person she is with?”

“You need someone named after a moral philosopher, not a mathematician.” Noether leans forward a bit. “But I will tell you this: breaking your promise doesn’t solve this problem, it just makes you a coward, and I didn’t think you were that.”

Angel rubs the side of his thumb against his jaw. “I don’t know if that’s true. Sometimes I still wonder who I am.”

“If you don’t know by now, that sharply limits the hope for the rest of us.” The dryness there makes Angel’s shoulders sink as he smiles. Noether smiles back. “You know,” he says abruptly. “I’ve killed many of your kind and never lost a second of sleep over it. But I think I would have lost sleep over you.”

With a bit of a humorous exhale, Angel tells him, “I appreciate that,” and finds that not only is his head clearer, the refrain that lives there ( _A century, alone_ ) has become a whisper at least for now.


	2. Chapter 2

She comes to the docks every so often. Not as a hobby or anything, but sometimes she’ll sweep around there- no reason to think vampires are so closed minded they’ll only hang out at the cemetery- and then sit and look at the ocean. She’s a California girl, done her fair share of beach going, but it still looks enormous every time.

Tonight, though, she isn’t just thinking deep ocean thoughts. She’s looking outward with her waiting face on (and her waiting outfit too, if she’s being honest, sexy but not like she’s working hard at it).

Angel is coming home.

He’d let her know through postcards, mailed from different cities and landmarks that she found on the map Giles had given her. She marked each with a sticker. She wasn’t going to be winning anything in the geography bee (that’s a thing, right?) but even she could tell that the sticker trail was moving quickly toward Sunnydale.

He’d sent the postcards with stamps that were somehow enchanted to make them impossible for anyone but her to see right, an extra precaution so that his route couldn’t be traced. Willow had been all swoony over them when they’d first figured it out- Buffy had shown her the first one to try to get her opinion on the symbolism of some ancient Greek ruins, and then had to describe them when Willow had asked why Buffy was so interested in an ad for a lawn mowing service- the idea of secret notes tickling romance for her, but eventually she’d gotten more interested in the stamps themselves.

“It’s such a cool trick,” she enthused whenever a new one would turn up. “I’m going to get Angel to show it to me when he gets back.”

“I’ll have him get right on it,” Buffy would nod, mock solemn, but it was mostly to cover the overthinky thing she’d start to do. Because if no one could read what he sent her, why stop at postcards? He might be old-fashioned, but they didn’t charge by the letter or whatever anymore, and you didn’t have to walk uphill both ways to buy ink.

(She may still be a best day B student in History, but this is proof that she’s been listening to her mom for next time she asks.)

Angel hasn’t been erased from her memory. She knows he didn’t exactly have a chatty lifestyle. Pretty much the opposite, really. But the idea that he’s choosing to send her sentences instead of paragraphs is making her feel less into the whole short and sweet thing. So is the fact that he won’t remember to make a stop by a phone so they can have an actual conversation. If he would just tune into technology, she could tell him to save his magic stamps. No one is watching her mailbox, no one is even really looking for Judge parts now.

She’d killed Spike and Dru a few months after Angel left. It got sickening to wait for them to come up with a new scheme for her to stop. Half the time they targeted people she loved, and the other half always seemed to happen when she was supposed to be writing a paper or studying for midterms. In the end they’d just been vampires. Dru had tried to say something creepy in her pouting girl’s voice when Buffy had cornered her, but she’d only gotten two words out before Buffy had stuck the stake in. Spike had bellowed and charged, trading his usual sarcastic humor for pure furious viciousness, but he’d still been injured, and Buffy had gotten him too.

There was no chance to tell him about everything after, about sinking the parts of the Judge into acid (“‘No weapon forged’ doesn’t cover the whole ‘dissolving, disintegrating, and liquefying’ family of solutions,” remarked Xander as they stood over the big vat) or about how they kept finding Giles and Ms. Calendar getting cozy in the library shelves (“It’s like they’re not even thinking about the sanctity of the stacks,” Willow would whisper as they retreated) or how Ms. Calendar revealed that she wasn’t who she’d said she was (“Report me to Snyder or stop talking to me,” Buffy would say crisply any time she approached, until they’d ended up trapped for nearly a day in part of the Sunnydale underground tunnel system and had been forced to talk).

She wants to tell him about the summer, how she’d gone totally Slayer on the road. She’d teamed up with Kendra in Phoenix, and had gotten to Boston in time to stop the super vamp Kakistos but not in time to save the Watcher there. It had made her go all come here, go away on Giles for months. She knows that Angel would have done that silent empathetic eye thing and then said something pithy and perfect about how loving people who could be hurt or killed was hard, especially when it felt like your fault for not protecting them, but that having and treasuring those relationships was one of the most important parts of being human, and that if something happened it wouldn’t be her fault and Giles would have been proud to know her either way.

Giles had ended up saying it after a few weeks, but she missed hearing it from Angel.

When she’d described a card of columned buildings with a tiny pencil sketch of a llama on the back, when Willow had pulled up schedules from Peru, tracing a finger over the computer screen and doing a little jumpy tap on the date that it was expected in Sunnydale, she’d felt an extra little spark when she put her star sticker over the orange blob of Peru on the map. _He’ll be here in enough time that giving him a Christmas present won’t even be weird. Just over the late side of belated._

Her nice waiting-for-Angel outfit doesn’t not exactly have the coziness factor, but she can see the ship, the enormous metal body of it on the horizon. She could basically swim to it. Or maybe not, it’s not like she’s a great swimmer, but Xander’s fishy swim team buddies could get there in a minute.

Docking the ship takes longer than she thought it would, but finally people start coming off. The first couple of guys are carrying crates ( _Wine_ , she thinks distractedly, remembering the little descriptive paragraph on Willow’s computer screen) and don’t even notice her.

She can’t even see Angel’s face, but he walks toward her right away.

 _He spent all this time away and he didn’t even bring a suitcase_ , she thinks, like that’s even the important thing, and then he’s in front of her.

“Hi,” she says, quiet and wavering.

“Hi.” And she isn’t sure who does what, but his arms are around her, and she’s smelling his Angel smell, wonderfully the same ( _Guess he didn’t need a suitcase after all_ ) wide and wild like fresh air on a hike, with salt and metal underneath.

His hands drape over her back, touching her bare skin, and she’s so telling Willow that this was the right outfit choice. She can feel his ring against her, and how they fit against each other so easily. He presses his mouth to her hair, and she closes her eyes against the softness of his sweater because she’s _missed_ that, missed how he could touch her, how the simple leaning safety of it felt natural and perfect and close as her heartbeat.

“How was-” She regrets starting the sentence. She doesn’t know how to end it.

“Fine.” She feels the word down her scalp. “The box is safe. I saw more of the world than I have in a few decades. I made a friend.” She squeezes him harder at that. She’d gone a couple of weeks without someone to call between the Hemery disaster and getting to be friends with Willow and Xander and she’d never want that to happen again. She can’t imagine those weeks multiplying into horrible, lonely years.

She holds her breath for a minute, holds him tight and real against her. Then Angel says, “I almost didn’t come back,” and she can still feel it against her scalp, his marginal voice.

“What?” The sailors are smoking and laughing in the streetlight beams a few feet away. They don’t even hear her, the fragile, startled word.

“No,” he says. “Buffy. That’s not-”

But she has already pulled away, squared within herself. “We should go. Giles and Ms. Calendar wanted to meet with you.”

* * *

They don’t talk on the way. Half of her likes that he’s listening, reading her “keep off” signs. It will be better to do this later, alone and after deep breaths. The other half, the half that walks faster than necessary and stomps as she does, wants him to at least try to fix it, so maybe she can have a chance to snap at him without seeming completely irrational.

But it’s not exactly in the nut zone to be angry that at their big reunion after almost a year, he basically said “hi” and “I didn’t actually want to see you.” She’s been missing him all these months, she hasn’t even been tempted, never in all that time, and she’s not totally hideous, so there were some people trying to tempt. But she’s been waiting, it hasn’t even been a question, and he’s apparently been questioning all over the place if he was going to break his word, the last thing he said to her.

Giles takes one look at her and does a speed-through of his questions.

“I’m sorry that you needed to take such a journey when we found a solution here,” he says when Angel has given a summary of everything that happened with the arm, “but I still believe it to have been necessary. If Spike and Drusilla had managed to put the Judge together before Buffy neutralized them, things could have become disastrous, even by Sunnydale standards.”

“I think he knows, Rupert.” Ms. Calendar comes up behind him, handing him a mug of tea. She is wearing her same clothes from school today, just the sweater removed- she and Giles have been cooking; the stove is on and it makes the apartment warm- but somehow it seems intimate.

Giles gives one of his sheepish little laughs and sips his tea. “Yes, of course. Well, thank you, Angel, I appreciate the time you put into this.”

“Well, time is one thing I have plenty of.” Something inside her, brain or belly or heart, hasn’t gotten the message that she’s angry with him. Just hearing him speak makes her step closer to him.

Angel seems to think they’re done. Buffy can see the predictive muscles starting to say goodbye, to go toward the door. But Ms. Calendar says, “Wait, there’s one more thing, Angel.”

She’s trying hard to be straight-backed and matter-of-fact about whatever she’s about to say, but Buffy has known her for a while now. She can see the square edges of her body, the way she glances over to one of the living room chairs as if she regretted leaving her arms bare for this. “You might have noticed something a few months after you left,” she starts, and tells him that she was meant to watch him, to make sure that his curse was working as it should. But she had found out that something about the curse had been kept from her, a loophole that could have terrible consequences.

“I don’t know what I believe anymore about you and your curse. Philosophy and ethics are above my paygrade.” Buffy sort of admires that, the way she can joke about it even as Angel stands in front of her. He is still, head down, twisting the ring on his finger. “But it’s a stupid risk, making it possible to take your soul away again without you even knowing that it could happen. If someone wrote a piece of code with a vulnerability like that, they’d be a computer nerd joke forever.” She shakes her head a little, dark hair shifting. “I tried to convince people of that but...my family can be stubborn. So I got rid of it myself, wrote in a patch. I wish I could have waited for you to get back, but once I knew, it seemed like a time bomb kind of situation. I know that you probably noticed. There might have been a little pain, some weird dreams. I hope it wasn’t too bad.”

“No,” says Angel. “Not too bad.” Buffy can see that he’s lying. There’s a different kind of hush to his words when he does that. She looks at him sharply, and then looks at Ms. Calendar. When they’d first heard about it, pain had been mentioned, but Buffy was thinking about something brief, the kind of hurt that Angel worked through or shrugged off all the time. Something about the curve of his neck, the press of his mouth, makes her think that it was more than that.

“I’m glad.” Ms. Calendar speaks faster, more easily, the hardest part over. “Angel, I know that there’s a lot of history here, but I think that giving your soul to you completely, with no risks is better for all of us.”

Angel nods. “Thank you,” he says. “For telling me.”

Giles and Ms. Calendar trade a tiny glance, like they had been expecting something bigger, like he would go all Hulk or promise to get revenge or do a whole tears of gratitude thing. Angel doesn’t give them anything. He just stands quiet for another minute, and then says goodbye.

Buffy walks out with him. She does not want to stomp anymore, despite the confusion of anger inside of her. Watching him hear about this soul of his that people seem to give or take whenever they want, seeing him pretend that whatever spell they’ve done now didn’t hurt him so no one would feel bad about it, makes her ache. Her love for Angel lives so easily inside of her that she doesn’t even notice it, except for times like this.

She doesn’t even want to call Willow tonight. She’s just tired of everything.

His hand swings toward her but she still doesn’t take it. They walk home separately.

* * *

She doesn’t say much at school the next day. Willow and Xander finally take the hint to stop their squealing and snarking after a few dozen of the single syllable responses usually reserved for teenager-parent interaction.

Strangely, it is the significant others portion of her friend group that makes her feel better. Cordy comes up to her in the hall between classes and says, “I hope that you and Angel are okay. I actually think you kind of deserve that,” and walks away, shaking her head a little at her own niceness, before Buffy even has to say anything. Oz passes her on her way to training, makes eye contact, and tells her, “People are tough in lots of different ways,” before adding with a considering bit of smile, “And that includes things that aren’t strictly people.” It’s possibly the longest sentence Oz has ever spoken to her, and while she isn’t sure if it’s the words themselves or Oz’s aura of calm assuredness, it’s comforting. She goes into the library less zombie-face than she has been all day.

Mom can tell that something's wrong. She does the heavy glance thing all through dinner. Buffy's been slaying for three years without her mother catching on, but one day of boy trouble and it's like she's a metal detector pinging on a metal thingy.

She gets through her homework pretty quickly, but it takes forever for her mother to decide to go to bed. Kendra's life still sucks, but Buffy could definitely get into the whole “sorry, gotta slay” lack of secrecy part.

Finally the house is quiet. She starts patrol with Rosedale. It's the smallest of Sunnydale’s many cemeteries, but it’s her favorite: nice flat ground, just enough trees to provide emergency stakes or an assist for a tough move but nothing too block-y, and the nicest flowers, if she's counting that kind of thing.

Angel would look just like a grave shadow in the dim light, but she knows better. Seeing him is the kind of awful-wonderful mix that makes her stomach go full roller coaster.

“Can we talk?”

“Yeah,” she says, keeping the world short and taut. She starts walking, eyes sharp.

He matches her steps. “I shouldn’t have said that the way I did.”

She turns quickly. “Oh, so your problem wasn’t that you were going to go back on your promise, your last promise you made to me before you left for a _year_ , it’s that you didn’t make the words pretty enough?” She laughs, cold as the air.

Something rustles behind them. They turn, or rather Buffy does. Angel barely moves his head, trying instead to place his hand on her arm. He sounds a little frantic, which feels kind of like victory. Maybe that’s petty, but she likes when he reacts, when he shows that she isn’t the only one with feelings, with desperation inside. “No, I just meant...I shouldn’t have made it sound like I was looking to leave. I never want to leave you, Buffy. But I was travelling for a year. All you can do in that time is think, and all I could think about was how unfair this is for you.”

“How is this unfair to me?” She grips her stake, trying to be mad enough that he doesn’t hear how small her voice comes out.

He looks away. “You already have it hard enough without being tied to me, tied to my weaknesses, and the things-” He makes a sharp, airy sound. “The things I’ve done.”

“What weaknesses? What things you’ve done?” It comes out breathlessly naive, and she hates that. She scans the graveyard, centering herself. “Everyone has problems, Angel. Granted yours are more blood and immortality than sex, drugs, rock and roll, but I don’t care about that. Do you think that a regular person could understand me the way you do? Do you think they’d be able to keep up with me? You being what you are has never hurt me. The things you’ve done- The things I’ve seen you do, that’s all been helping me, helping the people who live here.”

There’s a grave nearby that’s a week fresh. Angel’s steps are silent over the soft dirt as he moves away from her. “You don’t know what’s in my past, what’s inside of me.”

“So tell me!”

“No!” The word snarls out of him, and then he breaks, voice and body. “You heard about Drusilla. That’s with you forever now. I don’t want you to hear the rest. I don’t want all of them- My parents, my sister, all the children, all those people, none of them deserved it, I don’t want you to have to carry them, I don’t want them to touch you.”

“Oh, because I’m so pure? That stuff lives in me, too. I’ve seen bodies and I’ve lost half my wardrobe to guts of various colors. Do you think demon hunting instincts are all good fairy? Wise up, Angel. God, it’s like you’re walking around a dark room saying it’s hopeless when I have a flashlight right here!”

“Don’t trivialize this,” he says. Somehow they’ve gone rigid, facing up against each other. His teeth are gritted. “This isn’t something to wave away with a smart remark and a high kick to the chin.”

“No, this is me being the big girl slayer with a brain.” She’s all cold fury now. She snaps into his face,“I don’t need you to patronize me or be all selfless for my protection.”

“Maybe I’m not being selfless!” She isn’t frightened by the way he looks so untethered, but it startles her. She hasn’t seen it from him before, and she thinks he’s unbalanced by himself. This hasn’t gone the way either of them might have predicted. “Maybe I’m being selfish. Because I don’t want to stay with you until you begin to hate me for what I am and what I’ve done, for what I’ve told you or kept from you.”

Rosedale is silent around them. The hunt has been useless.

“You’re scared,” she says. She’s gone quiet, made small again. “It’s okay to be scared. But I don’t know what you’re pulling away from me.”

“This makes me a liability to you. It doesn’t matter if...I love you, but it doesn’t help it I’m a coward.”

“No,” she says. She pulls her arms around herself. She wants to collapse from the hurt, go to bed and sleep for weeks. “It doesn’t help if you don’t want to work on it.”

The thought hangs in the air. Before, it would have broken her to even mention it. But now she has a year of him living ghostly in her mind instead of solid in her sight, days of having him slip from her thoughts. Still, she trembles as she plucks the idea and give it voice. “I don’t know if I want to be with you if you can’t even try.”

They stand facing each other for a moment. Finally he says, “I didn’t want to leave you wondering what happened. I wanted to tell you why.”

“Thanks,” she says, blank and bitter. “So apparently the only reason you came home was to let me know that you’ve decided that we’re a bad idea, no matter what I think about it?” She stares hard at his face, but doesn’t detect even a tiny nodding motion, just his eyes looking down, away from her. She steps back. “I guess you wasted a trip, then.”

She leaves the cemetery alone. She hopes for a brutal fight at the next one.

* * *

Things are clean and quiet for the next few weeks, although Sunnydale clearly didn’t suddenly tune into her emotional needs. She doesn’t know whether Angel is doing it because it’s the vampire equivalent to therapy, or because he just wants to lend a hand, or he’s just finally listened to the end of _The_ _Breakfast Club_ , but she takes advantage. She goes Bronzing with the gang. She spends a couple nights hanging and talking with Will, where they dissect Oz’s latest three words, and try once again to figure out Cordelia and Xander, and don’t talk at all about Angel or about how this feels worse than the entire last year because they finally got to choose and they both chose to be apart. She gets a B+ on her English quiz.

Giles doesn’t even congratulate her about the grade, though. He’s started being really stressy, making her train an extra hour after school and do all this new focusing stuff.

The morning of her birthday, she wakes up tired, but her eyes automatically notice the change in her room: on the windowsill that was empty last night, there is now a narrow, brownish book with a dramatic, old-fashioned cover of a man and a woman. For a minute she wonders if there’s something she can do to revoke Angel’s invitation because the idea of him sneaking around, watching her silently, hurts, but then she just gets more interested in seeing what he’s brought her.

It’s called _Orpheus and Eurydice_. She flips the pages. It looks like poetry, too dense to read before school, but she tries a little.

‘Orpheus,’ she cried,

‘what madness has destroyed my wretched self, and you?

See, the cruel Fates recall me, and sleep hides my swimming eyes,

Farewell, now: I am taken, wrapped round by vast night,

stretching out to you, alas, hands no longer yours.’

She doesn’t really get it, but it makes her ache. She sits for as long as possible, looking at the pages, before she has to get ready for school.

Giles is weird all day. He won’t make eye contact, and any time she asks him about it, he finds something imaginary to do.

“Is there a level more than squirrely?” Xander asks as he, Buffy, and Willow watch Giles disappears around the corner, allegedly to help Mrs. Floyd, the geography teacher, with her new shipment of maps. “Chipmunky? Gophery?”

Buffy thinks about ditching English to confront him- the last time he got like this it was because there was a creepy, peeling demon from his past was possessing people- but she actually kind of liked the feeling of quiz victory, so she decides to talk to him at lunch.

When she finally gets to the library, Giles looks like he might actually have a little Eyghon knocking at his door. He isn’t at the “drunk at school” low, but Xander is definitely onto something.

“Giles, can you just stop the Mr. Pace attitude?” She ignores the crystals in front of her, flicking a hand at a chair instead. “Just...tell me what’s going on.” Her voice goes wavering and shallow for a second, but when Giles doesn’t sit, she tries to sound stronger as she says, “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

Over the summer, they spent days in a car together, figured out how to make a meal at midnight from vending machine snacks, argued over maps, tried to get Gremby blood out of motel carpet. And after, they talked about the ways they were pressed into a dangerous mission that they couldn’t leave without guilt. She’s closer with Giles now than she’s ever been.

So when he tells her about the council’s test and his part in it, she laughs in disbelief and calls it the Crucial Mento. Until he shows her the needles, the chemicals, and then she believes.

“I’m so very proud of you, Buffy,” he had said, eyes kind and anxious, when she’d finally told him how terrible it was, thinking of his humanness and her responsibilities and how much she depended on him. She’d believed him then, too.

“I have to go deal with this,” she says now, the words like a sword, and walks out, leaving him, and the school, and sixth period statistics behind.

* * *

She stays with her mother that night until Joyce falls asleep. Her limbs feel creaky and ancient, more than just from sitting in the same position for hours, or having a chemically underenhanced fight with an insane vampire, or from having to take care of her mother like Buffy is the parent.

Three years of hiding this from her mom. She’d sort of hoped it would turn out better than this.

The moon is high when she finally unfolds herself. She goes back to her room to change and to leave Angel’s book. She’d been reading it to her mother. Joyce had relaxed from the rhythm of the words, from her daughter’s voice. Buffy just tried to understand.

The first three cemeteries are clean. She gets into a nasty fight in the fourth that leaves her panting and feeling just a bit better. In the fifth she sees Angel.

He walks to her cautiously. She thinks he’s talked to Giles. “You didn’t have to patrol tonight,” he says. There’s a hunch to his shoulders. He looks shaken, focusing on the bruise Kralik left on her cheekbone. She doesn’t know how long it will take to heal even if Giles hadn’t finished dosing her.

“I needed some air,” she responds, although she’d having trouble breathing it.

“Can I-” He cuts himself off, but she knows what he means, or makes up her own meaning. She tucks herself against him, and he feels so solid, real and safe like she wouldn’t have to watch him in a fight, like maybe one day she’ll be able to put her heart in his hands and not worry about it.

She feels so much older than she had standing like this just a few nights ago.

After a while she says, “Stay with me?” Her voice flickers, just a bit, and she hopes that’s not the reason he says yes.

In her room, he turns his back automatically to let her change, but seems totally confused about where to go in the bed.

“I think you’ll figure it out.” Buffy pulls back the covers. “You’ve been doing it for a couple hundred years now.” It comes out tired instead of light and amused, but she doesn’t think he minds.

His legs tangle around hers, awkward from the bulk of his clothing, but his arms bracket her perfectly.

“I guess no circulation is sometimes a plus,” she mumbles into his soft sleeve resting beneath her head.

He laughs, soft and comforting by her ear. “I would trade away that benefit.”

“Sometimes we don’t get a choice about things like that.”

Holding her tightly, he says, “I didn’t know about the Cruciamentum. But if I had to guess I would say that it has very little to do with testing your ingenuity. If any creative person could have your job, there would be no need for a slayer. Taking away your strength was just a way to try to make you think they’re in control.”

She picks up her head a little as if considering turning to look at him. She resettles, but speaks pointedly. “Trying to control me. That seems to be going around.”

“I wasn’t-” He sighs alongside the protest, and it feels frustrating and victorious that she can drive him to that when he doesn’t need it. “You have to know that I wasn’t trying to hurt you or control your life. You know that…”

“Oh my God.” This time she turns over, facing him very closely. “You were going to give me the ‘it’s not you, it’s me,’ weren’t you?”

She’s looking right at him, and the only word for his expression is guilty. Well, maybe shifty, too. Either way, she almost laughs. “It’s true. But I’ve been thinking about it.”

“More than you thought about it alone on a boat for a year?” He turns a bit startled at how quickly she’s gone back to pointed, but she’s tired of being forgiving and blinded by love. It’s time for love to get glasses.

“It’s easier when I’m away from you.” It’s not insulting, the way he says it, just reluctant and pained and heavy with love. “When you’re around, I remember things other than logic and the reasons why not. I remember the first time I saw you, before you were called. I was worried then that you would be torn apart by the world, by the things you would have to do. Eventually I started to worry that you’d be torn apart by me. But none of that has happened. You’ve beaten everything in your path and you’ve only gotten stronger.”

Very carefully, she asks, “What are you saying?”

He looks away quickly, and then looks back, a flowering question in his face. “I’m saying that I want to try to love you more than my own cowardice. I’d like to try again. If that’s something you want, because I understand if I’ve-”

“Yes.” The word is out before she even really thinks about it. She considers what Giles and her mom (and Willow when she had finished her first starry-eyed babble and gotten her worried second wind) would say, and takes a minute. She sets her gaze forward and says seriously, “But this is a commitment. If you say you’re going to try, you have to do it. I don’t- I can’t keep wondering when it’s going to be too much for you. Being in a relationship like that…” She breathes, a shaking breath. “It’s not fair to me.”

“I know.”

“My parents, they didn’t have any of the big life stuff that we do, and they still got so angry with each other that they couldn’t make it work anymore. But before that, they had good years too. And I’d like it if we could have good years. For as long as we can.”

“My parents didn’t have good years that I can remember,” says Angel. His face is shadows. “But it sounds...It sounds perfect to me.”

They’re silent for a minute, then she tells him quietly, “I think that’s the first real thing you’ve told me about your parents.”

“It’s late now and you should sleep,” he says. “But I’ll tell you more another time.”

She thinks he’s smiling.

* * *

“Well, I wish you kids the best, I really do. But if you don't mind a bit of fatherly advice, I, uh, I-I just don't see much of a future for you two. I don't sense a lasting relationship. And not just because I plan to kill you. You two have a bumpy road ahead,” says the Mayor, and for an evil guy he sounds sincere.

Buffy turns to Angel, eyes widened. “Angel, have you ever considered that there might be more cemetery fighting than park walking for us?”

“Never occurred to me. It's shocking.” Angel stays totally deadpan, hands in pockets. Buffy grins. Anyone who thinks that he doesn't have a sense of humor hasn't been paying attention.

She tilts her head at him. _You want him or should I?_

He gives a sideways smile. _Go ahead_.

“Slayers first? Ladies first? Slaydies first?” she whispers.

“We'll work on it,” promises Angel, and watches as she strikes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This would have been finished sooner if I didn't like the sound of my own clickety-clacking fingers so much. Sorry for that, friends, and for the mellodramatic tonality and slightly uneven plotting.
> 
> This is my seventh year writing for the marathon and it's a thrill as always. Feel free to leave me a comment if you enjoyed, or if you just want to chat. I did attempt some thinking in writing this, so I might actually have something to say.


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